by Whitman · Cluster: Grief and Loss · Elegy · Clothing and Costume
Abstract
An elegiac lyric on memory and grief: a withered funeral wreath kept hanging because the dead friend remains vivid and unfaded in remembrance.
Connections
Motifs: Memory, Rose, Flowers, Death Themes & Concepts: Grief and Loss, Memory and Time Forms & Genres: Elegy
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: GOOD-BYE MY FANCY
Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is,
Let it remain back there on its nail suspended,
With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch’d, and the white now gray and ashy,
One wither’d rose put years ago for thee, dear friend;
But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded?
Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead?
No, while memories subtly play—the past vivid as ever;
For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee,
Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever:
So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach,
It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid.